Ready for the New Year

Sorting and Sifting

Ever stood in the midst of the holiday wreckage and carnage feeling completely sated and then it hits you “The New Year is was just here!!!” Yes, spring cleaning shouldn’t happen until spring, but this week after the New Year rolls in there’s an opportunity for sorting through what happened this year and getting into the new one.

The beginning of the new year is usually when we look back at the year behind us with gratitude and regret and make resolutions on how we’re going to move forward from here, usually by doing things differently. New Year’s resolutions are the butt of a million jokes because we tend to make them so grand and unattainable we can’t hold the course for more than a couple of weeks and then we chuck the entire enterprise, going back to the way we’ve been doing things all along. It’s a weird exercise in futility or in self-validation of our inability to achieve. But it doesn’t have to be.

Most resolutions are just self-abuse. We have no intention of actually succeeding with them, we devise them to seem logical and doable, but they are really like the quest for the Holy Grail . They will take all of our time and attention, require us to let go of our regular lives, and they are unattainable to all but a very few. Of course the inevitable happens. Within a week to a month we have given up on all of it and perhaps even forgotten we started in that direction. Life goes back to the way it was before more or less. Then we can say we tried and yet be released from such a drastic change. This seems harmless on the surface and everyone makes light of it knowing achieving or even acting on New Year’s resolutions has a very low chance of ever happening.

However, what is actually going on is self-abuse. The resolutions we set for ourselves usually fall into two categories: things we think we should do because other people think we should or things which are dear to our hearts that we truly wish to achieve. In either case, stating out loud we are going to do these things tells our hearts/minds/bodies and even soul we are going to work towards this goal and give ourselves this reward.

What happens when we don’t is we lose confidence in ourselves. Emotionally we are hurt in ways we have unfortunately come to accept and even expect. We set ourselves up to fail…